SurfScore

This is definitely for enterprise and school purchases. We have an educational app, Kodable, and a huge number of our users are still on iPad 2s. When you buy in volume, that extra $100 goes a long way, and, for better or worse, schools and enterprise don't always want cutting edge tech.

The thing I kept thinking when I was reading this was pedigree, pedigree, pedigree. Brown grad, University of Chicago, met at Harvard Summer School. Invested in a YC company already. One works at Stripe. This is quite the resume for two people.

On the other hand, it kind of worries me, because a lot of the most successful founders don't have anywhere near the level of accomplishment that is listed on this application. I think pg mentioned this at the last Demo Day. More and more "qualified" people are applying to YC now. I don't say this to diminish the quality of the application, I just wonder if these types of applicants are pushing out the young hackers that might have made it to an interview a few years ago.

People keep talking about the rising prices, but what is being done? What CAN be done? Its supply and demand. San Francisco will always be expensive because it is a desirable location for certain groups of high-earning people.

Being "progressive" is great, but we live in the real world and if you refuse to do things to lower prices in the name of culture, prices will keep going up. Ironically, this will also hurt, if not destroy, the "culture" that they're trying to protect in the first place.

I guess pg chose to pursue YC instead of that kickass goatee...

From Ycombinator's "What We Do" page:

One concrete consequence is that Y Combinator funding lets you sell early, if you want to. It can sometimes make sense to sell yourself when you're small for a few million, rather than take more funding and roll the dice again. Google likes to do early-stage acquisitions, and we expect them to become increasingly common as other companies learn what Google has.

If you take a large amount of money from an investor, you usually give up this option. But we realize (having been there) that an early offer from an acquirer can be very tempting for a group of young hackers. So if you want to sell early, that's ok. We'd make more if you went for an IPO, but we're not going to force anyone to do anything they don't want to.

The biggest issue with single founders isn't what most people think. Its not about getting more work done, or that you can't physically output as much code as two people. Most startups spend lots of "wasted" time going the wrong direction anyway.

The biggest issue for solo founders is the mental toll of a startup. Startups are hard, and you need that second mind to help you pull through the hardest parts. When you have two people, getting through the soul-crushing lows is a little easier because odds are both of you won't be miserable at the same time.

So apparently the app works because you can access someone's facebook page with the URL www.facebook.com/"#". With the number being the numbered profile they are.

Its curious, however, that Zuck is actually number 4 (www.facebook.com/4), numbers 1-3 are missing. I wonder why?

For kindergarten-2nd grade (5-8) I'd also recommend Kodable if you have an iPad. It simplifies programming concepts into a fun and interactive world where you have to guide a little fuzz ball through colored mazes. It teaches sequence, conditions, loops, functions, and even makes debugging fun!

http://www.surfscore.com

He matured as he got older, as Woz said. Getting forced out of Apple was a pretty humbling experience. His time at NeXT and Pixar helped as well. And just plain getting older...

Tolerance is great, but safety should always be the primary concern.

A significant amount of homeless people are homeless, sadly, because of mental conditions. I'm not saying that most homeless people are going to attack you in the street, but things like schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder can be extremely dangerous if they go untreated.

I've lived all over the country, and I've never seen such a big divide between two groups (wealthy tech and everyone else) as I have in the Bay Area.

The last time I was there, I realized why most of the protests for economic reform and "the 1%" are so strong in the Bay Area: because it is so blatantly thrown in people's faces! The streets are filled with Porsches and Teslas driving by the many homeless people in SF everyday. Rent is absolutely absurd. Most big cities have this problem, but its especially pronounced in SF (probably moreso than everywhere but NYC).

I think the thing that probably makes it worse in SF is, as mentioned in the article, many people don't work in SF. I don't know of many companies in Chicago, NYC, or Dallas providing free transportation to their headquarters in the suburbs, people that live in those places usually work in there too.

I'm not sure what can be done about this; Google isn't moving their headquarters to SF (nor should they). At some point this issue is going to boil over and something will have to change.

I think you're right, but I don't think the breakdown is as drastic as 99%. Traction is most important by a wide margin, because it proves that you're doing something right. This is a capitalist society where the market dictates what succeeds, and if the market dictates you're succeeding, then you're a hot commodity.

As far as YC goes, most HAVE traction by Demo Day, significantly so. It's not like these companies have an early beta with 20 users and are raising on a name. Most of the time they achieve early traction from a combination of YCs guidance and the fact that if you get into YC, you're typically a pretty good entrepreneur and have a higher likelihood to succeed.

This man's got spunk! Get him to Silicon Valley with some venture capital and he'll make waves.

From the "Philosophy" section of ycombinator.com/about (the whole section is relevant really):

One concrete consequence is that Y Combinator funding lets you sell early, if you want to. It can sometimes make sense to sell yourself when you're small for a few million, rather than take more funding and roll the dice again. Google likes to do early-stage acquisitions, and we expect them to become increasingly common as other companies learn what Google has.

If you take a large amount of money from an investor, you usually give up this option. But we realize (having been there) that an early offer from an acquirer can be very tempting for a group of young hackers. So if you want to sell early, that's ok. We'd make more if you went for an IPO, but we're not going to force anyone to do anything they don't want to.

I think YC prefers big successes but doesn't try to pressure everyone to be the next Dropbox or AirBnB

How did I know it would be the Steve Jobs article

The Tom Hanks movie "The Terminal" seems rather relevant here.

Is there a way to access from a NAS or other network share? I see options for network stream but its rather cryptic.

I'm talking weird glitches like a nib gets corrupted and I've made enough changes to matter but haven't committed anything yet

Dropbox revert to previous versions has saved my ass multiple times when something goes wrong in Xcode that I can't undo.

Nothing in life worth doing is

Fucking hard

They need to have better procedures in situations like this. A woman at night being approached by a bunch of men? The cons of staying are far greater than anything that could justify it. Sadly these situations happen so late that once the arrest is made, there is nothing that can be done until morning. That needs to change somehow.

Elon Musk put his last $3 million into Tesla to make payroll a few years ago.

Talk to your friends/colleagues and find a good lawyer to talk to about this. The legal situation could be all over the map depending on your employment contract.

Taxes are usually done after the fact. I.e you get a 1099-MISC from each person who has paid you, and you are liable for that.

Speaking of payment, learn to be a squeaky wheel about it straight off the bat. Freelancing is notoriously inconsistent, expect 60 day swings between receiving payment. DONT BILL BY THE HOUR. There's plenty of reasons why online.

Lifestyle-wise, figure out a way to be productive. You have to enforce accountability in yourself, you don't have a boss or a team counting on you. It doesn't matter when you work, you don't need to show up 9-5, you just have to get your shit done.

These two are nowhere near the same. Assange leaked information that actually put people's lives in danger. He directly named operatives undercover in places with governments that wouldn't think twice about chopping their heads off. This gives Snowden a bad name, and in my opinion devalues what he has done.

Certain people are going to like iOS 7 and certain people aren't. Its been that way with every single work of art since the beginning of time. Trying to "make" someone see the beauty in something they instinctively dislike is pointless.

For what its worth the "common" people (i.e. not the ones that write blogs or go on Hacker News) seem to generally like iOS 7, and that has always been Apple's primary market anyway.

I don't like Barbie, but I'm not a girl. Same thing.

I was referring to the original DRM decision as being too greedy when they made it (before the backlash). Companies institute DRM to decrease piracy, which increases their bottom line.

The effectiveness of DRM is a totally different subject, but in this situation they chose their bottom line (DRM) over the desires of their customers, taking a gamble that the losses in sales from pissed off people would be less than the gains from decreased piracy.

I don't get the negative response to this. They made a mistake (admittedly being too greedy), and now they're correcting it. People didn't like the DRM, SO THEY TOOK IT OUT! Get over holding a grudge; the Xbox has a lot of very good exclusives and has always been a solid console. It just goes to show you that you can never make the internet happy.

It's a shame that the App Store is becoming this commercialized. One of the best things about it in the early days was the fact that indie games could get noticed internationally. Sure we get games like Infinity Blade but indie developers gave us Tiny Wings.

Maybe Apple will implement something similar to Steam, where this is still possible.

Did any OMGPOP employees have stock options vesting still from the acquisition, or was it all cash?

If they did have stock options, did they immediately vest upon termination or did they lose them?